Preliminary Class Business

• Final paper due Friday, June 8 (sample topics)
  
  
• Start reading Califia. Also available for use at/from the following locations:
  
  
  • South Hall 2509 during Transcriptions TA drop-in tech support hours)
    
    
  • Library reserve service
    

Information as Identity: Body, Gender, and Race in Cyberspace (new unit of course)

(1) One view: information technology is so far from human identity that it turns people into non-identities:

• Computers are just calculating machines
  
  

  Sherry Turkle, "Who Am We?": "As recently as 10 to 15 years ago,  . . . The computer had a clear intellectual identity as a calculating machine. In an introductory programming course at Harvard University in 1978, one professor introduced the computer to the class by calling it a giant calculator." (p. 237)

  
  
• Computer users are "nerds" and "geeks" (i.e., people with non-existent or socially under-developed identities)
  
  
• Or they are cubicle workers (1 | 2)
  
  
• In short, computer users are themselves like machines.

(2) The other view (gaining ground since the early 1980s):

• Once the computer became a machine of media and communications, and also a machine of work, then it obviously became more than a calculating machine.
  
  
• The computer became a machine for making, changing, and experiencing human identity.
  
  
• Hypothesis: a new kind of identity in cyberspace?

Plan for Lectures

• What is Identity? — A Primer in the Contemporary Debate About Identity in the Humanities and Social Science
  
  
• Identity — The Difference Computers Make
  
  
• Identity — The Difference Computers Do Not Make
  (The Problem of the Internet and National, Gender, Race, Ethnic Identities)

What is Identity? — A Primer in the Contemporary Debate About Identity in the Humanities and Social Sciences

• Enlightenment idea of identity: "liberal individualism" (from the Cartesian cogito to "rational choice theory")
  
  
• Modern idea of identity: identity is determined by a larger structure (e.g., Freud, Max Weber, Frankfurt School, Claude Lévi-Strauss)
  
  
• Postmodern idea of identity: identity is part of an indeterminate structure:
  
  
  • French poststructuralism—e.g., Michel Foucault on knowledge structures ("epistemes")
    
    
  • Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari on "schizoanalysis" and "deterritorialization"
    
    
  • "Hybridity" theory in race, gender, and postcolonial studies
    
    
  • Artificial-intelligence studies and the "society of the mind" thesis
    • Marvin Minsky, The Society of the Mind, 1985
    • cf. Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky, The Turing Option, 1992
      
      
  • Cyborg theory:
    
    

    Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" "Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. . . . By the late twentieth century, . . . we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs." (p. 28) Hybridization of boundaries between (1) human and animal, (2) human and machine, (3) matter and pure spirit (see pp. 29-31)

    
    

    Cf., Bruno Latour on technology in We Have Never Been Modern

Identity — The Difference Computers Make

The "personal" and "networked" computer as a kind of laboratory of postmodern identity.

• Sherry Turkle's psychological research into the interactions of users with computers and her "windows" of "identity" metaphor (pp. 237, 242-43 in Trend)

The influential paradigm of the MUD.

• Lisa Nakamura, "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet" (2000)
  
  
• Julian Dibbell's 1993 article in the Village Voice on "A Rape in Cyberspace" (p. 212 on the "magic word")
  

But who are "you" when :

• You have no necessary body
• You have no necessary name
• You have no necessary gender
• You have no necessary race
• You have no necessary age
• You have no necessary social group with which you are identified

Identity in Cyberspace (as played out in LambdaMOO, according to Julian Dibbell's "A Rape in Cyberspace")

In RL, a grid of dualisms positions our identity in ways that enforce social divisions in which "we" are always restricted to one side of a relationship with "others."

In LambdaMOO, however, people are released from normal constraints so as to be able to "pass" as others.

But there is an unspoken rule in the LambdaMOO system--a kind of "human" rule (the rule that defines you, no matter what identity you take on, as human). The rule is that only psychotics or sociopaths can pass so completely that they create a complete break between their RL and VR selves, as if the VR self were purely "other":

• Mr. Bungle as "sociopath": p. 209
  

Normal people enter a magical, playful, or disturbing space of blurred relationships between RL and VR identities.

• legba's instability of character, p. 203
  
  
• compare the experience of childhood play: 1 | 2
  (David Fernie, "The Nature of Children's Play)
  
  
• compare the experience of imaginative fiction
  

In sum, computers "make a difference" in identity because they help people play out/imagine different or other selves in a way that internalizes the experience of difference to reflect the fluidity of actual relations between male/female, etc., and ultimately self/other.

Computers make this experience of difference more real (Dibbell on the "magic word" of computing, p. 212; cf., Simon Penny)

But Also: The Difference Computers Do Not Make
(The Problem of the Internet and National, Gender, Race, Ethnic Identities)

(Continued in next lecture)

References

• Resources on Gothic literature:
  • The Gothic Literature Page (English Gothic Fiction, 1764 to 1840) (Franz J. Potter)
  • The Literary Gothic Page (literary Gothicism of the 18th and 19th centuries; includes some resources in modern Gothic) (Jack G. Voller, Southern Illinois U. at Edwardsville)